Many visitors to YourEmployeeHandbook.com are preparing to hire their company’s first “real”, that is, non-family, employee. Hiring your first employee can be overwhelming. You may not know where to begin or what ou must cover in order to avoid potential legal and financial liabilities.

We’ve listed a few of the most critical steps are listed below, however, when hiring for the first time, review your state’s employment regulations with your business advisor and tax specialist to avoid employment pitfalls.

When hiring, first obtain an employer identification number from the IRS. Download the EIN form from the IRS website at www.irs.gov.

With employees, you will have to pay state unemployment compensation taxes. These payments go to your state’s unemployment compensation fund, which provides short-term relief to workers who lose their jobs. Each state has a different way of handling unemployment compensation reporting. The Employer’s Poster Kit included in Your Employee Handbook includes a comprehensive 50-state listing of contact information for state unemployment offices.

You’ill need to withhold a portion of each employee’s income and deposit it with the IRS, as well as making Social Security and Medicare tax payments. The IRS has a special site for employers at www.irs.gov/businesses. Download IRS Publication 15, Employer’s Tax Guide, which is a very helpful guide.

You must also comply with the requirements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act or OSHA to ensure a workplace free of hazards, train workers on safety regulations, notify government administrators about serious workplace accidents, and keep detailed safety records. Rules vary depending on the type of industry. Go to OSHA’s website for specific information on your industry at www.osha.gov. Once you’ve researched OSHA’s requirements, you can use the basic Safety Program included with Your Employee Handbook to document your safety efforts.

Many federal and state government agencies require you to post notices providing information on worker rights for your employees. For information on the posters you are required to post, visit the Department of Labor website at www.dol.gov or refer to the Employer’s Poster Kit included with Your Employee Handbook.

For each employee you hire, create a file in which to keep job-related documents, such as job applications, employment offers, IRS Form W-4, performance evaluations, and sign-up forms for employee benefits. Medical records should be kept in a separate, confidential file, in a locked cabinet. You also need to keep I-9 Forms, which document an employee’s immigration status, in separate files and save the documents for at least one year after the employee has separated from your company. These forms, and many other HR forms, are available in the Companion Forms publication, included with Your Employee Handbook.

It is also is an excellent idea to provide a copy of Your Employee Handbook to each new (and existing) employee. Make it clear that employment with your company is “at-will”, and provide the new hire with a copy of the Handbook Acknowledgement Form to sign, and return to be held in their file.

These are a few of the critical first steps employers need to take when hiring employees. Following these steps will help reduce or eliminate problems with employee discipline, terminations and lawsuits in the future.

Your Employee Handbook continues to offer the most comprehensive small business employee handbook tools available in the market, with the advent of the newest site feature: FREE downloads of workplace posters for federal and state employment laws. There’s no need to pay for something your tax dollars have already purchased, or to waste time hunting for multiple sites around the ‘Net trying to find all the latest posters.

You can visit the main Poster Page to download all the Federal workplace posters you’re required to display. Or visit the State Poster Page for your state and download all the state-required posters. Pages for Georgia and Maine are online — with more to come each week.

Each page also contains links to the most frequently-used publications, forms, web pages, and resources needed to manage your employees in accordance with labor law.

Three-quarters of employees in a recent poll said it doesn’t make any difference to the quality of their work whether their supervisor is on the premises or not.

In fact, 23% of the survey respondents — the survey was conducted by employee assistance program provider ComPsych Corporation — boasted that they actually get more work done when the boss is away.
 
A scant 2% admitted they tend to put off work when the boss isn’t at their elbow measuring their progress.

“The survey proves what smart managers have known all along — employees are self-motivated for the most part and micro-managing is not effective,” said Dr. Richard A. Chaifetz, chairman and CEO of ComPsych, in a news release about the survey. “Employees perform and excel when they have a healthy work environment, clear-cut expectations and goals and the right support from their managers. Training programs from behavioral health experts and consultants can help develop the sort of managers who bring about the best results.”

A new survey from LifeCare, Inc. indicates caregiving duties interrupt the workday or require work schedule adjustments.

The survey found 24% of workers surveyed who care for a child or elder said they often have to make phone calls/arrangements during the work day. Twenty-two percent said they often have to leave work early, while 16% reported having to take the day off to tend to caregiving duties.

Arriving at work late was an adjustment to the work schedule created by caregiving cited by 14% of respondents. Five percent said they have to ask their spouses to adjust their work schedules at times.

Nineteen percent of respondents chose the “other” category of work schedule adjustments, which LifeCare said included changing from full-time work to part-time work, changing work shifts, waking up earlier, and leaving work at lunch.

“Obviously, people who care for children and older adults are going to need to make adjustments to their work schedules from time to time,” said LifeCare CEO, Peter G. Burki, in the release. “But employers can reduce their absenteeism and productivity losses by providing employees with support tools such as resource and referral services and backup care programs.”

Nearly 54% of HR professionals have had to discipline employees for wasting time on the Internet, according to recent research from content security specialist Clearswift.

In addition, more than 46% have encountered or had to discipline employees for accessing pornographic sites at work. According to a Clearswift press release, another 14% of HR professionals surveyed said they have had to discipline employees for confidential data leakage, and 7% reported having to do so for posting inappropriate content on social media sites, blogs, and wikis.

Sixty-four percent of respondents said their firms continue to block access to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, 63% block access to wikis and blogs, and nearly 70% prevent their employees from accessing video or photo sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

“While 87% of the people we surveyed reported that their organizations have a written Internet use policy, only 61% of their companies actually have a technology solution in place to enforce the policy – 20% of the respondents didn’t know if they have a solution in place,” said Stephen Millard, VP Strategy at Clearswift, in the press release.

Only 35% said their companies’ Internet usage policies covered the use of Web 2.0 sites and technologies, while 25% said they did not know.

When it comes to policy enforcement and monitoring, the survey found HR professionals are deferring to the IT department. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said monitoring is left to the IT department. In the event of a violation of the acceptable use policy, 47% of respondents said they rely on their IT department to notify them if they believe a breach has occurred.

Only 3% reported that their HR department monitors employee Internet use and determines if a breach has occurred. In 15% of the cases, the HR department is automatically notified by the IT system of a possible breach. Almost a quarter (23%) reported that employee Internet usage is not monitored, but HR will investigate if notified of a possible breach by an employee or manager.